Samuel Macedo

Text by Rosely Nakagawa

“The Japanese word ‘mingei’ is an abbreviation of the expression ‘mingei hin’, which can be translated into English as ‘popular art’ or ‘people’s crafts’. The term was coined by the Japanese philosopher Yanagi Soetsu (1889-1961), during a period marked by intense urbanization, industrialization, and the expansion of mass consumer society in the country.

Yanagi Soetsu’s interest in folk art was influenced by ideas propagated by art critic John Ruskin and socialist designer William Morris, associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, which spread throughout Great Britain in the late 19th century and later to the rest of Europe and the United States.

Faced with a society undergoing radical change due to the Industrial Revolution and the consequent transformation of rural craftsmen into urban factory workers, the Arts and Crafts movement brought together university-trained designers, artists, and craftsmen in the production of high-quality utilitarian objects. The aim was to challenge the then-dominant separation of fine arts from decorative arts considered lesser.

The Arts and Crafts movement was driven by a desire to change the lives of ordinary people by advocating for the work of the folk artist as a source of pleasure and dignity that integrates life with beauty, work, and society, without barriers and defined boundaries.

In other words, artistic craftsmanship is developed by the community without techniques, academic categories, nomenclatures established by connoisseurs, and specialists classifying and interrupting the pleasure of creating freely and joyfully.

Artists living in regions where nature provides a more direct interaction with individual or collective creative processes, such as in Cariri, need this freedom to live with themselves and with other artists.

Samuel Macedo’s artistic practice comes from this tradition and direct interaction with the natural territory of the region.

For the artist, photographing or filming is like dancing or playing with the Masters of Culture, close to the waters of the waterfalls of Chapada do Araripe. It is like entering the forest with the Master Woodsman at dawn in search of the dew collected on the leaves. Practicing blessing and devotion rituals with the Master Healer on the way up to the Horto. Running with children after butterflies and frogs on wet paths after the rain.

In the images of Master Photographer Samuel Macedo, nature, joy, and luminosity invite us to stop time to appreciate the authentic relationships of the pleasure of creating, amidst the balance and harmony of human beings perpetuating their crafts and pleasures.

He is a rare representative of an authentic artist who has ancestral wisdom, bringing together in his work images constructed alongside nature and everything it represents at its best and most authentic.

He produces for those who know how to recognize what is beautiful and pleasurable; for those who let themselves be carried away by beauty in its fullness, stamped in his images.”